[APPLAUSE]

JOE HUSTON: Yes.

So thank you, guys, so much for having me.

In general, Google was super early

in supporting GiveDirectly and the Google community broadly

and in helping people out who are extremely poor by sending

cash through our platform.

And so we've always felt really close to the Google community.

And it's nice to be able to come back and talk about what we're

up to, some of the debates that are happening

within the development and other sectors, and how cash, I think,

is moving those forward.

As Max said, I've worn a few different hats at GiveDirectly.

When I first started at GiveDirectly,

I was in Kenya on the operations side,

managing our team, signing people up to receive cash.

I spent a year and a half or so there, about a year and a half

in Uganda, and just recently switched back

over to the finance side in New York.

And what GiveDirectly does is pretty straight forward.

We send cash unconditionally to people living mostly

in extreme poverty.

That cash is a grant.

It's not a loan.

People can spend it however they want.

In the most typical model, we will send about $1,000

in a couple of chunks over the course of a few months.

And then people spend it on whatever they want.

In total, we've raised almost $150 million

to deliver as cash transfers.

And we've enrolled over 80,000 households.

Because our operations are fairly straightforward,

we're able to stay remarkably lean.

And so, on average, about 90% of what

we raise for cash transfers gets delivered directly

to people's hands at the end of the day.

And then as we're doing all of this work,

we're constantly running different types

of research studies.

And so when we first got started in Kenya,

we ran a randomized controlled trial

testing a bunch of different things about cash transfers--

comparing large lump sum cash transfers to recurring stream

transfers, testing whether or not male recipients spend money

differently from female recipients,

as well as the effect of cash transfers

on a ton of different outcome variables, earnings

and assets, consumption, but also things

like stress and depression and things like that.

Since then, we've done a number of different research studies.

We can talk about things like looking at the effects of cash

transfers on macro--

the macro aspects of the economy--

behavioral aspects of cash transfers,

how cash transfers affect coffee farmers,

and how they invest in their farms and things like that.

Operationally, the process looks a lot like a sales and customer

service operations.

We'll go door to door and collect data

on the people who could potentially

receive cash transfers, run a pretty simple logic

to decide who is eligible, then go back

and collect a little bit more data

and inform them about the program.

We'll then send the money, typically through Mobile Money.

And so that looks like Venmo, but you're

able to cash out basically anywhere around you.

And we can send thousands of payments

with a touch on a laptop.

And then we have full time call centers

in each of the countries where we work.

And so after every time we send payments,

we're able to call people up and confirm that they've

received it, ask if they have any feedback for GiveDirectly,

and understand if they've had any problems.

Now that model of just giving unconditional cash

is very different from how we're taught through aphorisms

or parables about how we're supposed to approach giving.

There's this idea that you're supposed to teach a man to fish

or not give him a fish.

Or that you should give a hand up but not a handout.

And I think behind that, there's this idea that giving cash

can't be sustainable.

And there's also this idea that we should distrust

the people we're trying to help somehow, that giving them money

could be corrupting.

Or if it's not corrupting, that we just

can't trust from the outset that it could be spent well.

Behind that basic debate, the stakes

are actually remarkably high between how we

should approach helping people.

To give you a sense, this is one way

of visualizing what's up for debate.

The blue line is global official development assistance.

It's one measure of this total amount

that governments are spending in foreign aid.

The line that's going down over time

is the cost of closing the poverty gap.

You can think of this as taking everyone

who is below the global poverty line

and visualizing how much in cash it would take to get them

to the poverty line.

Now, there's a lot of reasons why

that's a simplistic picture of what's going on.

But the basic synthesis is that we have incredible resources

available to help the people we're trying to help,

to help the people in extreme poverty.

And a lot of the problem of aid and development

is an allocation one-- that it's not

so much that we need more resources,

but we need to better allocate them.

And so this debate about how best should we

help people is actually extremely important.

So luckily, we don't have to have

this debate in this arena of dueling assertions.

It doesn't have to be this theoretical or philosophical

debate about what people are really like.

We can test it.

A development that's happened over this last couple

of decades within development economics

is moving a little bit away from theory

towards actually putting things into experimental evaluations.

And so the gold standard approach to this

is what's called a randomized control trial.

It's the same way that we test medicines--

by randomly assigning people to either receive or not

receive a treatment and then using external evaluators

to test the differences in the different outcome variables

between those two groups.

We've learned a lot of different things

from that about different interventions we use.

We've learned that we're actually

pretty bad at training people or teaching people to fish.

The effects of microfinance and things

like that are actually pretty mixed.

We've also learned that the effects of cash

are remarkably consistent, that the exact impacts can vary

a lot by the structure of the cash transfers

or the people who are receiving them or the context.

But you see a few consistent themes.

First, people spend it pretty well.

You see increases in earnings and consumption,

decreases in food insecurity, improvements in nutrition,

often increases an uptake on things like health services

or actual improvements in health in terms of fewer accidents

or better health.

You see decreases in stress.

To give you a sense of the variety of responses

to cash or to security, one study in Malawi

tested giving the families of young women

a small recurring cash payments-- so just a little bit

of security, not a total game changer.

What they found is that those women whose families received

got married later, pregnant later,

and had lower rates of HIV relative to the control group.

Because they had a little bit more security in society.

On the other side of the spectrum,

a study testing giving young people about $400 all at once,

if they went back and compared that group of people

to a control group, and found that their earnings

were 40% higher.

That basic result was mirrored in GiveDirectly study that

found that a year after people received about $1,000,

their earnings were 30% higher and their assets

were 58% higher.

The other things you don't see are the things

people are often worried about.

There is this sense that if you give people money,

they might drink it.

Or it will be corrupting, and they'll stop working.

But all of the evidence we have from what's

been 165 different studies of cash transfers, which suggest

that that doesn't happen.

The studies have found that this consumption of, quote,

"temptation goods"-- things like alcohol or tobacco

or gambling-- either has stayed the same for cash recipients

or has gone down.

And similarly, the work effort-- how much time people are

spending working--

has either stayed the same or gone up

in the different studies that have been

done in the developing world.

The other thing that's happened more recently

over the last decade is an explosion

in mobile money, which has made delivering

cash transfers a lot easier.

And so today, there are 93 countries with mobile money

and over 400 million current mobile money users.

That makes this job of getting cash into people's hands pretty

easy.

And the mobile money infrastructure

doesn't have to be as robust as it

is in Kenya, which has the best network in the world.

It can actually be pretty lightweight.

A study we did in Uganda tested the limits

to say, how good does the payments infrastructure have

to be for mobile payments to work?

And so we found just about the most remote place

you could go to in Uganda--

a place very, very North in the country,

just on the border with South Sudan--

where people typically would walk something

like four or five hours to get to the nearest town,

which was also where the nearest paved road would be.

We found that if you sent mobile money to a place that actually

didn't have any mobile money providers there already,

this market responded-- that the market incentives for cashing

people out worked.

And agents came to the village to cash people out.

And so this technology exists to get cash into people's hands

really, really cheaply.

As a result of those, there are two trends.

There's a ton of different applications

where we can use cash transfers to solve or address

a bunch of different types of problems.

And so to give you a sense, these

are some of the projects GiveDirectly is working on

around the world.

And so the first one is the thing we've done most often.

It's these large one time cash grants of about $1,000.

And I think these are best geared

if you want to give people investment capital.

And so you see bigger increases in earnings

that expect large increases in assets and things like that.

You can also use cash transfers to address humanitarian issues.

And so we just started a project in Uganda,

which has taken in a lot of different refugees

from surrounding countries.

The typical approach to these types of crises

is to pay people who run settlement camps per head

by this number of people they're supporting.

And while that seems intuitive, the incentives are all off.

Because the incentives are to keep people alive,

but not support them to move on with their lives.

And so the test we're doing in Uganda

now is giving people about $750 and letting them

to spend it however they want.

You can also use cash for things like a universal basic income.

And so I'm sure we'll talk about this more in Q and A.

But the basic idea here is if you want to make sure

that everybody is living up to a certain standard of living,

one way to kind of mechanically insure

that is to give everyone a cash transfer equal to the cost